Chimichurri

About a year ago, our friend Angelique had the Haverim over for a pot luck. Her husband Hugo was going to be grilling beef ribs, and while we sat around sipping wine or beer, she brought out some appetizers. There was a platter of chips and veggies and dip -- isn't there always? -- and a platter of sliced tomatoes with mozzarella cheese melted over it, topped with chopped basil. Scrumptious!

But then she brought out the dish that made me fall in love: small bread slices accompanied by a green pesto-looking sauce she called "chimichurri." I could not get enough of the parsley-garlic-olive oil mixture. It was heavenly.

I tried to get her to post her recipe on Facebook; I tried to replicate it from what she told me. However, it was only yesterday that I figured out how to make a comparable chimichurri.

After researching numerous recipes on the web, and remembering the taste of Angelique's version, I came up with this:

Chimichurri

8 cloves of garlic
1 cup packed flat-leaved parsley (cut off the stems)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil (and maybe a bit more, to suit your taste)
1 - 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

Chuck all of it into a food processor and let 'er rip for as long as it takes to make the stuff into a bright green slush.

Serve over meats, pasta, veggies, however you like. Especially offer it as a spread for fresh bread.

Variations include adding basil, or onion, or hot peppers, or cumin.

So very good, truly a work of art.

Poppies sketch

So, so very soon, the California poppies will be blooming.

With the aforementioned watercolor brushes, and a few passes of colored pencil, I finished this little bit of play tonight.

I held the pens with their flexible, brush-like points and felt an unaccustomed sense of jealousy; I got watercolor pens for Christmas (and I am grateful and pleased with the gift) but Alex got a graphics tablet for her computer, and she has been arting up a storm with it.

I've borrowed it a couple times, and oh, the things one can do with that beast! The future is unclear ... I may be able to use it while she is at work, and we three will co-exist peacefully, or I will have to get my own.

In the mean time, my daily creation has been either for writing, or cooking, and I've been a negligent blogger about it. It's only with the last two days of amazingly clement weather that Lillian has been yipping at me to work in the studio so that she can safely play out in front of the house. I am the guard dog who watches over her with the garage door open. It is better light for the studio, after all.

Brush Strokes

Alex gifted me with some flexible-tip "watercolor" pens at Christmas, and I only just began to play with them.

The black brush-strokes were first, then a few green. Then I thought of centaurea, and how much I liked them in my wildflower garden of 15 years past. I added blue.

The yellow bits were just for some color balance.

2010

With the New Year, I have been aware of the need to create something every day, and make that a priority.

New Year's Day and yesterday, I worked on writing the next chapter of Transitions, a rather boring soap opera that follows the next stage of life at the Reich estate and Owen Reich-Ambris' transformation from kid to trying on his father's shoes as owner of the estate.

One of the things I've learned over the past traumatic two and some years is that while I do enjoy writing and need to write when I'm ill or emotionally hurt, what comes out of my keyboard is not quality work. No less than four novel-length writings are pretty much all dreck. I've been re-reading them lately and felt my face burn with embarrassment all the way through. I won't delete them, but it's very likely that I will re-write them, or at least gut the hell out of them and just pare them down to a couple short stories.